The Poor Man of Toggenburg - Autobiography of Ulrich Braker

There are other passing literary references, for example, the contemporary novelist Peter Weber compares his own reactions to entering the vibrant life of Zürich with Bräker's enthusiastic response in the 1780s.

Another notice of commemorative events proclaims hopefully that in the summer of 1998 the Toggenburg is "under the sign of Ulrich Bräker" and gives references to criticism of his works to be broadcast later. There is plenty of evidence of commemoration on both the serious and the more frivolous levels. Both, however, appear to spring from the intellectual classes rather than from the common people.

At the end of his life, then, it can be seen that Bräker's reputation stands or falls by his autobiography (better known), and his diary. The "urge to sermonize" of his youth produced writing which even he himself could see to be overheated piety, his poetry was awful, most of his dialogues and satires are imitations of other writers (except the criticism of Shakespeare and Lavater). He had plenty of episodes on his conscience, some imaginary, some real, which, were it not for the diary would make it easy to show him up as a thorough hypocrite. So not a great writer, nor, in the usual sense, a great man, yet he is more than just a window on the past.

Certainly he does satisfy the needs of the modern reader of biography, to enter a world that is at the same time entirely different from ours and yet often so entirely the same, but that alone would not endear him to us. It is his own personality, that he shows to us with so little bashfulness, in which we see the profound differences and the striking similarities. Perhaps the most important and enjoyable lesson that we can learn from reading him is simply that no two souls are alike. The editors of the Chronik [p 7] can thus find him a niche in literary history; his work "the impressive witness of a man who spontaneously found expression for wonder about his life and existence, and thus shared in his own inimitable fashion in the discovery of the individual at the end of the 18th century". It is dangerously easy to compartmentalise Bräker's work, including it in the literature of the Age of Reason, or looking forward to the development of interest in individual psychology which later included the novels and essays of the 19th century. Yet the richness of his background does not end there, his work also looks back to the days of the Pietists - and by way of his father and his wife, even further back - to the 17th century, when all that one really needed to know was between the covers of the Bible and Arndt's "True Christianity".

Faced with the diary as a whole or at least of the substantial part of it shown in the "Chronik", one has to conclude that Bräker

never

stopped boxing the compass as to whether his writing was intended for general publication, for his children or as a spiritual exercise intended only for God, or simply as the result of a compulsive tendency to scribble. A final decision on this point was never taken. This does not mean that all our stories are of equal value or that we all possess Bräker's skill - or his good luck - in unraveling them. If we believe what he tells both directly and by inference from his own story, we know that all our stories, written or unwritten have each their own particular value.